Hamburg, Germany - 18 September 2014: Evotec AG (Frankfurt Stock Exchange: EVT, TecDAX, ISIN: DE0005664809) announced today after careful evaluation that it will take legal steps against Israel-based Andromeda Biotech, Ltd. ("Andromeda") to recover all Evotec claims and potential damages that result from recent incidents in relation to DiaPep277®.
On 08 September 2014, US-based Hyperion Therapeutics, Inc. ("Hyperion") announced that it will discontinue the product development of DiaPep277® for newly diagnosed Type 1 diabetes, because Hyperion affirmed that it uncovered evidence that certain employees of Andromeda in collusion with a third-party biostatistics firm in Israel engaged in serious misconduct with regard to the use of generated data in order to manipulate the analyses to obtain a favourable result of the Phase III trial.
In 2007, DeveloGen AG ("DeveloGen") sold all rights to the drug candidate DiaPep277® to Andromeda, a newly formed wholly owned subsidiary of Clal Biotechnology Industries Ltd. Under the terms of this asset purchase agreement, DeveloGen transferred all rights in DiaPep277® to Andromeda in return for single-digit royalty rates and certain milestones in the single-digit rate upon commercialisation of DiaPep277®.
Evotec, which acquired DeveloGen in 2010, had no involvement in any aspect or decision-making regarding the development of DiaPep277®. Similarly, Evotec's subsidiary DeveloGen, was also not involved in any way in the further development of DiaPep277® after selling it to Andromeda in June 2007, and had absolutely no role in the data generation and analyses. Consequently in light of the recent developments with DiaPep277®, Evotec has decided to take legal steps against Andromeda to recover all Evotec claims and potential damages that result from this recent fraudulent activity.